Toy train wise I'm reasonably good at things like the color of dirt but this do it yourself electrical stuff is really Greek to me... I look forward to the day when all this stuff (dcc, switches, steam locos etc.) will be available to a retail buyer like myself....Looking at the prices payed for some of the stuff in other larger scales.....well....money's no object..

I've not vanished, but it's slow progress, I've relocated two of 6 wires on the dcc decoder and I'm waiting for a booster and encoder to arrive.I've got a RPi2 setup with a skinny Debian install and JMRI on it.

Some tweezers to hold the stupidly small decoder in the clamps of helping hands is pretty much all I need.I can't wait to show you guys a t train running on dcc.

I did see it briefly with decoder pro, and it was able to tell me its settings, but after i disconnect it from the test loom i was using and bonded it to a train's power rails it was no more in evidence and I've not seen it report anything since.

I suspect my eager stripping of the motor outputs MAY have lead to a brief short. *oops*.

I've ordered another decoder to see if i can be a little less hamfisted with it.It's annoying because I'd successfully relocated all the wires to sit at 90 degrees to the board rather than 0.

I'll prove the concept on the train with the new board before I bother to rejig the wiring to fit in the chassis :/

dkightley wrote:Congratulations on having tied the knot. I hope the day went well...and wish you and your good lady good fortune for the years to come.

Er, Doug, last time I checked, Caitlin is traditionally a woman's name... perhaps time to make use of the embarrassed smiley?

Anyway, congrats,and I really am curious to see how the DCC approach works out. That is an avenue that I never even considered attempting. One very nice feature about T is that there is still room to pioneer things and try something truly unique.

I'm using a sprog 3 and JMRI with black and red wires connected to the bogie and orange and grey wires connected to the motor.

When i read and write values to the decoder the motor does little glitchy movements so electrons certainly have the option of getting places.

After I've read and set some values in the decoder I then open a "throttle" and wiggle something and exactly nothing happens.I've been reading pages of JMRI docs and watching youtube videos and can't find a single thing that actually tells me what to press in what order to make a train go backwards and forwards.

Would any of you spiffing chaps have the faintest idea what I might be missing from my understanding.I'm unsure if I need to change from "programming" to "running" mode or something or quite what. :/

Pretty standard, I expect, but all you have to do is make a public post on a forum to embarrass yourself, then clean your track discover that you have appalling power pickup, add bridging wires so you can pick up from front and rear bogies and you have a dcc t-gauge train.

I've had to drop the lighting out of the ICE unit, but I have two functions on the DCC board remaining and I have hopes of getting lighting back.

Thing I have to figure out now are: "how does one run a multi-unit train with dcc?" Which I assume is just to set the dcc units to the same ID number and hope they all pull the same."how do you actually make model scenery?"

You have actually managed to squeeze a decoder into the vehicle - I am officially very impressed.

In the larger scales, some model locos do have two motors working off a single decoder (the Heljan OO Garratt for example). My best guess is that as long as the motors and mechanisms are reasonably well matched, you would lose a bit of (potential) fine control but otherwise things would be fine. And seriously, even without DCC, with two or three motor units per train we do get a bit of slipping and lack of synchronisation anyway and yet that doesn't cause any problems. Another important factor for you to consider is the poor pickups on T gauge locos and their vulnerability to dirty track and wheels - even more important for DCC than DC. If you have two power units sharing the same decoder then that means wiring them together and hopefully sharing more pickup wheels which will greatly improve overall reliability. That would more than compensate for any potential sync issues.

As for scenery, assuming that is a serious question , there are lots of techniques, and it is much the same as in larger scales. Browsing some of the layout threads here would show you several approaches. I personally tend to favour the corrugated cardboard + plaster bandage + paint + scatter process.